"A fire crackles along the banks of the Yamuna River: a cremation of a young mother, struck by a car while she was fetching water. The stench of the river engulfs the sad assembly."

"Government says 330 million people are suffering from water shortages after monsoons fail".

"Indian villagers have found a way to bottle the fragrance of monsoons."

"DHAKA - On the streets of this South Asian mega-city, jammed solid with rickshaws, honking taxi vans, cars, bicycles, sweating pedestrians and lumbering buses with their paint scraped off in tight squeezes, getting anywhere quickly by road is impossible."

"Coal-fired power plants have propelled much of China’s economic rise for decades, helping make the nation the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Even with economic growth slackening, and other energy sources taking hold, new coal plants have been added. Now Beijing is trying to slow things down."

"China's quest to fence off a big chunk of the South China Sea may have just gotten another, powerful boost: plans for a fleet of floating nuclear power plants that could provide huge amounts of electricity for the far-flung atolls and islets."

"Vietnam said on Thursday it was investigating whether pollution is to blame for a spate of mysterious mass fish deaths along the country’s central coast after huge amounts of marine life washed ashore in recent days."

"More than 100 people are feared dead in India in an early-summer heat wave which forced schools to close and halted outdoor work like construction, government officials said on Thursday."

"Nuclear catastrophe is always an unmitigated disaster. The only beneficiaries, albeit in a perverse fashion, are animals,  which tend to flourish in areas humans evacuate. This has certainly been the case for wild boars around Fukushima, which have multiplied so rapidly, they’ve become a problem for neighboring towns."